What is the purpose of Geography? What do geographers study and why? How do they seek to shape the world they interrogate?
This book addresses these questions by examining the lives and works of individual geographers, both past and present. Like all disciplines, Geography is no more nor less than the collective endeavours of researchers and teachers operating in specific contexts. The contexts both shape, and are shaped by, these individuals. This book’s biographical and autobiographical chapters transport readers to the times and places where geographers have sought to make Geography matter. The result is a more vivid, grounded understanding of the discipline than the many high-level surveys of geographic thought-paradigms currently written for university students.
This book’s accessible essays each conclude with a study task. Making Geography Matter is aimed at university students and their teachers who wish to understand the goals, history and evolving practice of Geography. It provides an alternative perspective – both concrete and engaging – to the many student-focussed texts that map-out numerous ‘isms and ologies’.
What is the purpose of Geography? What do geographers study and why? How do they seek to shape the world they interrogate?
This book addresses these questions by examining the lives and works of individual geographers, both past and present.
1.Introduction
Noel Castree, Trevor Barnes and Jenny Salmond
Part 1 Making Geography
2.Absolute beginner? Halford Mackinder and the popularization of geographical
knowledge
Emily Hayes
3.Geography as the science of environmental influences: Ellen Semple and the
search for disciplinary relevance
Innes M. Keighren
4.Keeping human and physical geography together: Richard Chorley and Peter
Haggetts scientific turn
Trevor Barnes
5.Contemporary geography: Advocating for a heterodox subject
Rita Gardner
Part 2 Making geographical knowledge
6.Landscape and environmental change: Carl Sauer on land and life
Kent Mathewson
7.From mapping to GIScience: A sixty-year project
Michael F. Goodchild
8.Radicalizing geography: The case of David Harveys Marxism
Eric Sheppard
9.Open horizons from here to there: Doreen Masseys geographies
Jamie Peck
10.Geographies of meaning and experience: Anne Buttimers lifeworld
Federico Ferretti
11.Landscape as a way of seeing: Denis Cosgroves symbolic geographies
Veronica della Dora
12.Boundaries and borders matter: Ron Johnstons electoral geography
Charles J. Pattie
13.Mobility matters: Movement, meaning and practice in the context of power
Tim Cresswell
14.Scale matters: The case of workers and their geographies
Andrew Herod
15.Proximity, distance, and difference: The global and the intimate
Gerry Pratt
16.Which realities are we trying to understand? The workings of a physical
geographer in the quest to respect river diversity
Gary Brierley
17.Beyond science: Climate change in a wicked world
Mike Hulme
18.Other geographies: Engaging with different ways of knowing, valuing, and
acting in post-colonial Australia
Sue Jackson
Part 3 Making geographical knowledge matter beyond Geography
19.Geographers and the national state: Dudley Stamp plans Britains towns and
countryside
Trevor Barnes
20.Geographically empowering the marginalized: Bill Bunge, expeditions and
maps
Luke Bergmann and Trevor Barnes
21.Making other economies possible: Geographies of ethical action
Katherine Gibson
22.Speaking truth to power: Microplastics and the sewage scandal from the
rivers of Manchester to Westminster
Jamie Woodward
23.Talking geography in the public realm
Danny Dorling
Noel Castree has worked at the universities of Manchester, Wollongong and Liverpool, and the University of Technology Sydney. He is managing editor of the journals Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning F. He is author of the books What Future For the Earth? (2025) and Making Sense of Nature (2013).
Trevor Barnes is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he has been since 1983. His research is in economic geography and on the post-war history of human geography. He is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.
Jennifer Salmond is Professor Physical Geography at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is a physical geographer whose research interests include urban meteorology, air pollution, climatology and critical physical geography.
